Medieval Europe — feudalism, faith, plague, and the 12th-century renaissance

Intuition Beginner

Roughly a thousand years separate the fall of the western Roman Empire from the voyages of Columbus. The older English label for those years, the "Dark Ages", is misleading. The centuries from about 500 to 1500 saw the rise of the Islamic caliphates, Tang and Song China, and the Mali Empire, while Europe itself founded universities, codified canon law, and raised the Gothic cathedrals. The companion unit 32.11.01 tells the narrative from the post-Roman mosaic to the Black Death. This depth unit goes further into the four structures that organised European life and that later modernity inherited: the lord-and-vassal order, the papacy, the twelfth-century renaissance, and the demographic shock of the plague.

Each structure carries the Roman inheritance. The land-for-service bargain we call feudalism bound a warrior aristocracy from king down to local knight, and it sat on top of an older Roman law of property. The papacy ran a parallel government with its own courts, taxes, and written law. The twelfth-century renaissance founded the universities and the scholastic method and engineered the pointed arch that let walls thin and windows grow. The Black Death of 1347 to 1351 killed perhaps a third of Europe in four years and rewrote the bargain between lords and labourers.

One warning before we go further. "Feudalism" is a modern word that medieval people did not use, and historians now argue over whether it names a real system at all. The deeper skill this unit teaches is how to read a contested concept: take a load-bearing label apart, weigh the evidence for and against it, and see what is gained and lost by keeping it. That skill transfers to every contested concept across the humanities.

Visual Beginner

Figure: The four load-bearing structures of the depth unit, with their characteristic windows and the concrete figures the analysis returns to. The bars are not to scale; they locate each structure in time against the millennium between Rome and modernity.

Structure	Characteristic window	Defining fact
Carolingian empire	768-843 CE	Charlemagne crowned emperor 800 CE; partitioned at Verdun 843
Lord-vassal (fief) order	c. 900-1300	land held for mounted military service
Papal monarchy	c. 1050-1303	investiture conflict 1075-1122; Fourth Lateran Council 1215
Crusading movement	1095-1291	Kingdom of Jerusalem 1099-1291 (192 years)
Twelfth-century renaissance	c. 1050-1250	Bologna, Paris, Oxford; Gothic pointed arch
Black Death	1347-1351	roughly 25 million European deaths; near one-third mortality

Worked example Beginner

How do historians turn parish rolls and tax records into the headline mortality figures? We work the Black Death arithmetic step by step, then read a duration from the Crusader East.

Step 1: Fix the population at risk. Europe on the eve of the plague, around the year 1340, held an estimated 75 to 80 million people. This is the denominator. The figure is reconstructed from hearth taxes, parish rolls, and poll-tax records, so it carries real uncertainty, but the order of magnitude is firm.

Step 2: Count the dead. Across Europe, between 1347 and 1351, recorded and inferred deaths fall near 25 million. Some regions lost far more than others: crowded Mediterranean ports and the cities of Italy and Provence were hit hardest, while parts of Poland and the Basque country escaped comparatively lightly. Twenty-five million is the working European total.

Step 3: Convert deaths to a rate. Divide the dead by the population at risk. Using 25 million deaths against 75 million people gives 25 divided by 75, which is about 0.33, or one third. Against the upper population of 80 million the rate is about 0.31. Either way the European mortality rate sits near one third, with the worst-hit regions losing half.

Step 4: Read a duration. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem was founded when Crusaders took the city in 1099 and ended when the Mamluks took Acre in 1291. The span is 1291 minus 1099, equal to 192 years. That single subtraction frames how long a Latin Christian state sat on the Levantine coast.

Step 5: Follow the consequence. With perhaps a third of workers dead, labour grew scarce and dear. The English Statute of Labourers of 1351 tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels and failed. Within a generation, serfdom was dissolving across much of western Europe as survivors bargained for pay and freedom.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition Intermediate+

This section fixes the terms the deeper analysis depends on. Several are institutional rather than numerical, because the depth-side questions about medieval Europe are questions of structure, jurisdiction, and interpretation.

The post-Roman successor states are the Germanic kingdoms that replaced Roman authority in the western provinces: the Franks in Gaul, the Visigoths in Spain and Aquitaine, the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards in Italy, the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and, continuing without a break, the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire at Constantinople, which called itself Rome for another thousand years. The transition was not a single collapse in 476 but a generation-by-generation replacement of imperial tax machinery with warrior aristocracies living off the land.

The Carolingian order is the Frankish imperial project of the Pepinid dynasty, crowned by Charlemagne's coronation at Rome on Christmas Day 800 CE and administered through itinerant royal courts, paired inspectors called missi dominici (one lay, one clerical), and written decrees called capitularies. It was partitioned among the three grandsons of Charlemagne at the Treaty of Verdun in 843. The order's defining limit was administrative: it ran on the king's personal presence, not on a professional bureaucracy comparable to Rome's or Byzantium's.

Feudalism, as the term is used in this unit pending the contested-question section below, denotes a model of reciprocal personal obligations among the warrior elite: a lord grants a fief (land and its income) to a vassal in exchange for homage (a personal oath) and mounted military service, typically for forty days a year. A vassal might in turn grant portions of his fief to sub-vassals, producing a chain of personal bonds. The model is a modern synthesis assembled from northern French charters; whether it names a real European system is the contested question this unit foregrounds.

The three estates (ordines) is an ideological tripartition of Christian society into oratores (those who pray, the clergy), bellatores (those who fight, the nobility), and laboratores (those who work, the peasantry). It is a normative model advanced by bishops and kings, not a sociological description: it omits merchants, Jews, Muslims, the urban poor, and most women, and it functions to naturalise hierarchy as divine order.

Investiture is the ceremony by which a bishop receives the symbols of office; the investiture conflict of 1075-1122 was the dispute between the papacy (Gregory VII) and the empire (Henry IV) over who controlled the appointment of bishops and thus the lands and revenues attached to bishoprics. It was settled in principle by the Concordat of Worms (1122), which split investiture into a spiritual half (ring and staff, from the Church) and a temporal half (scepter, from the emperor).

The twelfth-century renaissance denotes the expansion of literate culture, c. 1050-1250, that produced the universities (Bologna in law, Paris in theology, Oxford, Cambridge, Salerno in medicine), the recovery of Roman law through the school of Bologna and Gratian's Decretum, the scholastic method of structured disputation, and Gothic engineering. Its defining technology was the combination of pointed arch, ribbed vault, and flying buttress, which let builders raise taller, thinner, lighter-filled walls.

The Black Death mortality rate over 1347-1351 is the ratio of European deaths to the population at risk:

$$r_{1347\text{-}51}=\frac{\text{European deaths}}{\text{European population c. 1340}}\approx \frac{2.5\times 10^7}{7.5\times 10^7}\approx \mathrm{0.33.}$$

The denominator and numerator both carry genuine uncertainty, so the rate is a range (roughly 0.30 to 0.50 in the hardest-hit regions), not a single exact value.

Counterexamples to common slips

Slip 1: "Feudalism was a single uniform system." Arrangements varied enormously by region and century. England after 1066 was unusually centralised under a single king; the County of Flanders had a dense, market-oriented peasant freehold; much of southern Italy and the Low Countries had comparatively little serfdom. A model built from eleventh-century northern France does not describe thirteenth-century Sicily.

Slip 2: "The 'Dark Ages' produced no learning." The twelfth-century renaissance, the founding of Bologna and Paris, the recovery of Aristotle through the Toledo and Sicilian translation movements, and the engineering of the Gothic cathedrals all fall inside the period. The Islamic and Byzantine worlds were advancing the same Aristotelian and mathematical material in parallel.

Slip 3: "The papacy was a purely spiritual office." The medieval papacy was a territorial and fiscal state. It ruled the Papal States in central Italy, collected Peter's Pence from England and Scandinavia, drew tithes and annates from every Latin bishopric, and fielded armies. The investiture conflict was a jurisdictional dispute between two governments, not a dispute between church and state in the modern sense.

Slip 4: "The Black Death was a European event." It was Eurasian. The pathogen spread from Inner Asia along trade routes; the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi recorded some 200,000 dead in Cairo alone, and the Moroccan scholar Ibn Khaldun, who lost both parents to it, described a plague that "devastated nations and caused populations to vanish" across East and West alike.

Comparative framework Intermediate+

The four structures above are the descriptive core. The contested question is whether the most load-bearing of them, feudalism, is a coherent system at all. The literature carries two live positions, and the unit takes neither as settled.

Position A: the classical model (Bloch, Ganshof). On this view, feudalism names a real and describable set of institutions. Francois-Louis Ganshof's Feudalism (1944) gave the tight legal model: the fief, the act of homage, the obligation of mounted service, and the personal lord-vassal bond, treated as a replacement of public Roman authority by private contract in the post-Carolingian centuries. Marc Bloch's Feudal Society (1939-1940) widened the lens from the legal bond to a total social order: a warrior aristocracy bound by kinship and homage, a subject peasantry, and a fragmentation of sovereignty that reached from the king's court down to the village. On the classical account these features really did organise post-Carolingian Europe, even if their local forms varied.

Position B: the constructivist critique (Brown, Reynolds). On this view, "feudalism" is a modern construct that tyrannises over the evidence. Elizabeth A. R. Brown's 1974 essay "The Tyranny of a Construct" argued that the word forces a vast range of disparate, local, time-bound arrangements into a single artificial schema and should be abandoned by serious historians. Susan Reynolds's Fiefs and Vassals (1994) extended the case across the documentary record of England, France, Germany, and Italy, arguing that medieval feudum was used inconsistently, that the neat lord-vassal pyramid is a seventeenth- to nineteenth-century lawyers' synthesis rather than a medieval reality, and that the medieval landholding and personal-bond practices were far more varied and politically integrated than the classical model allows. ^{[Brown 1974] [Reynolds 1994]}

The two positions do not simply contradict each other; they disagree about what counts as evidence and how much weight a model should carry against documentary diversity. The classical historians built their model from a real concentration of northern French charters that do show fiefs, homage, and service; the constructivists reply that those charters are a sample, regionally and chronologically narrow, and that the same documents use feudum and vassus in ways the tidy pyramid cannot accommodate. The current settlement, to the extent one exists, accepts the force of the critique: most medievalists now use "feudalism" only as a heuristic or a comparative term (applied, for example, to Japan), and treat the Bloch-Ganshof pyramid as a description of one region and a few centuries rather than of Europe. The disagreement was productive precisely because it drove historians back to the charters. ^{[Wickham 2009]}

Bridge. This comparative framework builds toward the Enlightenment and revolutions unit 32.17.01, where the dismantling of "feudal privileges" by the French National Assembly in August 1789 appears again as an explicit political program, and the question of whether public authority had ever truly dissolved into private contracts returns as the social-contract debate. The foundational reason the feudalism contest matters beyond medieval studies is that the legitimacy of every later European state was argued over the ruins of the feudal model; this is exactly why revolutionaries in 1789 could abolish "feudalism" by decree, treating a contested historians' construct as a live legal category. The central insight generalises to every period concept whose descriptive usefulness must be argued rather than assumed, and it appears again in the Roman law unit 32.07.02 pending, where the Roman law of property that underlay the fief is the inherited grammar on which the whole debate rests. The bridge is that "feudalism" is a tool of analysis, and a tool is judged by what it lets you see, not by the authority of its name.

Exercises Intermediate+

Advanced results Master

This section takes four depth questions as far as the evidence allows: why the Carolingian imperial project could not hold, what the investiture conflict actually settled, what the Crusades produced beyond the military narrative, and how the Black Death rewrote the European economy. All four are interdependent, and the humanities addendum requires that their contestation be shown rather than hidden.

The Carolingian imperial project and why it did not hold

Charlemagne's empire was the largest western European state since Rome, reaching from the Ebro to the Elbe and from Rome to the North Sea. Its instruments of rule, the missi dominici sent out in pairs to inspect the counties, the capitularies issued to standardise law and church practice, and an itinerant court that moved between royal estates, were genuine administrative innovations. Chris Wickham's account stresses that the Carolingian achievement was real: for two generations the Frankish kings could mobilise the aristocracy, reform the church, and project a coherent ideological claim to imperial authority inherited from Rome. ^{[Wickham 2009]}

The empire's limit was not military but informational and fiscal. It had no standing army funded by taxation, no professional bureaucracy comparable to the late Roman or Byzantine civil service, and no fiscal machinery to sustain either. Command ran through personal bonds with regional aristocrats whose interests only partly aligned with the centre. The communications technology of the age, a horse-borne messenger network on poor roads, could not hold so large a territory together under a single will. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 did not create the fragmentation; it formalised a division that the underlying administrative capacity had already made inevitable, and it produced the three units, roughly France, Germany, and a contested middle strip, that medieval and early modern European politics would spend centuries fighting over. ^{[Bartlett 1993]}

The investiture conflict as a constitutional hinge

The conflict between Gregory VII and Henry IV, dramatised by the encounter at Canossa in 1077, was the first sustained European argument about the jurisdictional boundary between two universal claims. Gregory's position, set out in the Dictatus Papae of 1075, was maximalist: the Roman church had never erred and never would, the pope alone could depose emperors, and his legates stood above all bishops even in absence. The imperial position was that the king, anointed by God, controlled the church within his realm, including the appointment of its bishops. ^{[Cantor 1993]}

The Concordat of Worms in 1122 split the difference along a line that proved durable: investiture was divided into a spiritual half (ring and staff, conferred by the Church) and a temporal half (scepter, conferred by the emperor after homage). The settlement did not declare either power supreme; it recognised two ordered spheres and left their boundary to be fought over case by case. That boundary recurred in Becket's conflict with Henry II of England (1170) and in the Anagni crisis of 1303, when Philip IV's agents assaulted Boniface VIII. The high-medieval papal monarchy peaked not at Canossa but under Innocent III, whose Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 defined transubstantiation, mandated annual confession, and ordered Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive dress, an agenda that reveals the papacy as a governing institution with reach into the daily life of every Latin Christian.

Consequences of the Crusades, 1095-1291

The companion unit 32.11.01 carries the military and multi-perspective narrative. The depth question is what the Crusades produced. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted from the capture of the city in 1099 to the fall of Acre in 1291, a span of 192 years; the Latin Christian military presence on the Levantine coast is only one of the consequences.

Economically, crusading built the Italian maritime republics. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa grew rich supplying and transporting the Crusader states, and the commercial instruments that supported them, the commenda partnership contract, bills of exchange, and early deposit banking, were developed and stress-tested in the eastern trade. The military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers, became transnational corporations with estates across Europe and a banking function that moved money between a knight in Champagne and his colleagues in Acre.

Intellectually, crusading's largest product was the translation movement. The schools of Toledo after its 1085 capture, and of Sicily under the Norman and Hohenstaufen kings, brought Aristotle, Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy from Arabic into Latin, often via Jewish intermediaries. This is the supply side of the twelfth-century renaissance: without the Arabic Aristotle recovered through crusading-era contact zones, the scholastic project of Abelard and Aquinas has no raw material.

Politically, crusading expanded fiscal capacity. The Saladin tithe of 1188, levied to fund the Third Crusade, was the first general income tax in English history; the sale of crusading indulgences developed a fiscal instrument the papacy would reuse for centuries. The negative consequences were equally durable: the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204 permanently weakened Byzantium and poisoned Latin-Orthodox relations, and the Rhineland massacres of 1096 hardened into a recurring pattern of anti-Jewish violence that the unit marks as an atrocity under any modern moral framework. ^{[Cantor 1993]}

The Black Death as an economic hinge

The pandemic of 1347-1351 killed an estimated 25 million Europeans, roughly one third of the population, and perhaps a comparable share across the wider Eurasian trade network; al-Maqrizi recorded some 200,000 dead in Cairo. The demographic collapse converted, within a generation, into an economic transformation. Labour grew scarce; wages rose; rents fell. The English Statute of Labourers of 1351 attempted to cap wages at pre-plague levels and failed, because enforcement ran against the brute arithmetic of supply and demand that the worked example above computes. Across western Europe serfdom dissolved over the following century, as lords bid against each other for scarce labourers and peasants commuted labour service for money rent or walked away to towns. David Herlihy's argument, that the plague "transformed the West" by breaking inherited structures of labour and inheritance, captures the scale of the shift. ^{[Herlihy 1997]}

The transformation was regionally uneven. In eastern Europe, east of the Elbe, the same demographic shock produced the opposite outcome, the "second serfdom", in which landlords used their stronger political position to bind the surviving peasantry more tightly rather than less. The difference turns on the relative bargaining power of lords and peasants, which the plague exposed but did not by itself determine. The plague also intensified scapegoating, in the Jewish pogroms of 1348-1349, and weakened the church's moral authority, as intercession failed and the flagellant movement offered an alternative account of the disaster that the hierarchy could not control.

Synthesis. Putting these together, medieval Europe was not the static interval between antiquity and modernity but the laboratory in which the institutions of the modern state, the university, and the legal profession were prototyped. The central insight is that each structure studied here, the Carolingian empire, the papal monarchy, the crusading apparatus, the university corporation, the post-plague labour market, was an institutional innovation whose consequences ran far past 1500; this is exactly why the Enlightenment's self-description as a clean break from "feudalism" is ideological rather than descriptive, since it required the active dismantling of institutions that demonstrably still existed in 1789. The foundational reason the period rewards close study is that the bargains struck then, between sacerdotium and regnum, lord and vassal, labour and land, reappear as the explicit subject of early modern political theory. The analysis generalises to every transitional period, where the contest between inherited institutions and new forces is worked out case by case, and the bridge is that the modern state inherits its constitutional vocabulary, estates, privileges, consent, corporation, office, directly from the medieval institutions dissected above.

Connections Master

• The Roman Empire and its fall 32.07.01. Every structure in this unit sits on top of a Roman inheritance. The Carolingian claim to empire, the persistence of Roman law in the Byzantine east and its recovery in the Latin west, the Latin language as the medium of church and scholarship, and the very ideal of a universal Christian polity are all legacies of Rome. The depth unit's account of why the Carolingian project could not hold is a direct sequel to the Roman Empire unit's analysis of what late Roman fiscal and bureaucratic capacity had been, and what its loss meant.

• Roman law and governance 32.07.02 pending. The feudal lord-vassal order debated in the Comparative framework section rests on a Roman law of property whose grammar medieval charters inherited even as they reshaped it. The recovery of the Corpus Juris Civilis at Bologna in the eleventh century fed directly into the twelfth-century renaissance analysed here, and the jurisdictional distinction between spiritual and temporal power codified at Worms in 1122 drew on a Roman-law vocabulary of office and sphere that the Roman law unit supplies.

• The Islamic Golden Age 32.10.01. The Arabic Aristotle that the Toledo and Sicilian translation movements carried into Latin is the supply side of the twelfth-century renaissance. Without the Islamic preservation, commentary, and extension of Greek philosophy and science that the Golden Age unit documents, the scholastic project of Abelard and Aquinas has no raw material, and the Gothic engineering of the cathedrals loses its mathematical substrate. The Crusades are the violent contact surface through which much of that transmission passed.

• Enlightenment and revolutions 32.17.01. The dismantling of "feudal privileges" by the French National Assembly on the night of 4 August 1789 is the point at which a contested medievalists' construct became a live legal category that a revolutionary legislature could abolish by decree. The depth unit's treatment of feudalism as a contested concept prepares the reader to see why 1789's self-description as a break from feudalism is itself an ideological claim rather than a neutral description, a point the Enlightenment unit develops for the revolutionary era.

• Medieval Europe and the Crusades: perspectives 32.11.01. This unit is the depth complement to its companion. The companion carries the multi-perspective narrative, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Byzantine, Norse, and peasant; this unit carries the structural analysis of feudalism, the papacy, the twelfth-century renaissance, and the plague economy to the depth the companion raises but does not exhaust. Reading the two together gives both the human and the institutional account of the same millennium.

Historical & philosophical context Master

The making and unmaking of "feudalism"

The medieval word is feudum, a fief. The system "feudalism" is modern. Montesquieu used the phrase loi feodale in The Spirit of the Laws (1748); the noun "feudalism" itself is nineteenth-century, consolidated in the legal-history faculties of the German universities. The classical synthesis came in two forms in the 1930s and 1940s: Ganshof's tight legal model of the fief and homage, and Bloch's broader social model of feudalism as a total order. Both were built primarily from northern French evidence and both treated the result as a description of European society. ^{[Bloch 1961]}

The constructivist reversal came in two stages. Elizabeth A. R. Brown's "The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe", published in the American Historical Review in 1974, argued that the word forces a diverse documentary record into an artificial schema and called for historians to abandon it. ^{[Brown 1974]} Susan Reynolds's Fiefs and Vassals (1994) extended the case across England, France, Germany, and Italy, arguing that the lord-vassal pyramid is largely a post-medieval lawyers' and historians' synthesis and that the medieval evidence shows landholding and personal-bond practices far more varied and politically integrated than the classical model allows. ^{[Reynolds 1994]} The current settlement accepts the force of the critique: "feudalism" survives as a heuristic or comparative label, but the classical Bloch-Ganshof pyramid is treated as a description of one region and a few centuries, not of Europe. The contest is a case study in how a concept survives by being re-specified rather than refuted.

Periodization and the "middle" ages

The tripartite ancient, medieval, and modern scheme is a Renaissance and Enlightenment construction. Petrarch supplied the image of a dark middle period between antiquity and its rebirth (rinascita); the German historian Christoph Cellarius fixed the threefold division around 1700. The "middle ages" (medium aevum) is accordingly defined only negatively, by what it is between. Other civilisations periodise differently: dynastically in the Chinese tradition, by caliphate in the Islamic tradition. Jacques Le Goff's Medieval Civilization (1988) and Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity (1971) each, in different ways, dissolved the clean break at 476 by pushing the transformations of Rome forward into what Brown called late antiquity and by reading the medieval period on its own positive terms rather than as an interval. ^{[Le Goff 1988] [Brown 1971]} Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome (2009) reframes the period around the transformation of Roman structures, not their disappearance. ^{[Wickham 2009]}

A note on normative claims

Several claims in this unit are normative rather than purely descriptive. The judgements that the feudal order was oppressive for the peasantry, that the 1099 and 1204 massacres and the 1348-1349 Jewish pogroms were atrocities, and that the 1215 Lateran clothing decrees were unjust, are evaluative claims grounded in modern moral frameworks, not measurements. The unit marks them as normative and does not present them as neutral description. The descriptive core, the dates, the mortality rates, the institutional mechanisms, and the existence and substance of the historiographical disagreement, stands independently of any normative frame. Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe (1993) is cited here for the expansion of Latin Christendom by conquest and colonisation, 950-1350, an account that treats the period's violence as a structural fact of aristocratic expansion rather than as a moral parenthesis. ^{[Bartlett 1993]}

Bibliography Master

Primary and legal sources:

@incollection{gratian,
  author    = {Gratian},
  title     = {The Decretum},
  note      = {c. 1140; the Cambridge and Toronto medieval canon law translations},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  year      = {1993}
}

@book{dictatuspapae,
  author    = {Gregory VII},
  title     = {Dictatus Papae (1075)},
  note      = {in E. Emerton, trans., The Correspondence of Pope Gregory VII},
  publisher = {Columbia University Press},
  year      = {1932}
}

Modern scholarship:

@book{wickham2009,
  author    = {Wickham, Chris},
  title     = {The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000},
  publisher = {Penguin},
  year      = {2009}
}

@book{wickham2016,
  author    = {Wickham, Chris},
  title     = {Medieval Europe},
  publisher = {Yale University Press},
  year      = {2016}
}

@book{legoff1988,
  author    = {Le Goff, Jacques},
  title     = {Medieval Civilization 400-1500},
  publisher = {Basil Blackwell},
  year      = {1988},
  note      = {orig. La civilisation de l'Occident medieval, 1964}
}

@book{brown1971,
  author    = {Brown, Peter},
  title     = {The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150--750},
  publisher = {Thames \& Hudson},
  year      = {1971}
}

@article{brown1974,
  author    = {Brown, Elizabeth A. R.},
  title     = {The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe},
  journal   = {American Historical Review},
  volume    = {79},
  number    = {4},
  pages     = {1063--1088},
  year      = {1974}
}

@book{reynolds1994,
  author    = {Reynolds, Susan},
  title     = {Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  year      = {1994}
}

@book{bloch1961,
  author    = {Bloch, Marc},
  title     = {Feudal Society},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  year      = {1961},
  note      = {2 vols.; orig. La societe feodale, 1939--1940}
}

@book{ganshof1964,
  author    = {Ganshof, Francois-Louis},
  title     = {Feudalism},
  publisher = {Longman},
  year      = {1964},
  note      = {orig. Qu'est-ce que la feodalite?, 1944}
}

@book{bartlett1993,
  author    = {Bartlett, Robert},
  title     = {The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950--1350},
  publisher = {Princeton University Press},
  year      = {1993}
}

@book{cantor1993,
  author    = {Cantor, Norman F.},
  title     = {The Civilization of the Middle Ages},
  publisher = {HarperCollins},
  year      = {1993},
  note      = {revised and expanded edition}
}

@book{herlihy1997,
  author    = {Herlihy, David},
  title     = {The Black Death and the Transformation of the West},
  publisher = {Harvard University Press},
  year      = {1997}
}